Reddit Is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills [video]

Just run under the assumption that all information is subject to intentional and unintentional bias, and requires careful analysis. It&#x27;s a safe assumption most of the time, and you need to form that habit of thinking anyway.<p>To be honest, those shills on Reddit tend to be pretty obvious, but then they have to be given their target audience. More importantly they only really exist on some parts of Reddit, and it&#x27;s only really easy for them to get lost in the scrum on the big boards like politics and news. You get the occasional obvious bit of PR floating through ELI5 or AskScience, but it&#x27;s quickly spotted and killed.<p>When PR can be accomplished by random flaks, it&#x27;s useful. When they require expertise on part with their targets to achieve their goals, it necessarily restricts their target pool, and increases their overhead.

This is obvious and has been for years. Reddit is full of astroturfers, spammers, marketers, disinformation, trolls, and other generally undesirable behavior.<p>I generally look at reddit like one fractional step above facebook, it&#x27;s basically internet pollution curated by the most effective spammers.

By the way the person (upvote seller) who was called in the first part of the video ironically didn&#x27;t do his part to make sure that the caller wasn&#x27;t scamming him.<p>He didn&#x27;t ask any questions and he didn&#x27;t put the caller on the spot. Doing that (if well done) would have allowed him to potentially uncover the true purpose of the call even if it wasn&#x27;t admitted. He allowed the caller to control the conversation (with his backstory) and as a result went along with everything and just answered questions. Also hard to believe that the average caller to this service asks questions like that and sounds like that. [1] Part of what I do involves ferreting out the truth when contacted by phone and by email so maybe this was just obvious to me after hearing the interaction.<p>[1] Because they are real customers. Anyone who takes calls for a living and isn&#x27;t asleep can usually tell the patterns of what a real customer sounds like.

I&#x27;m a huge fan of Elon Musk, and I really want him to be successful, but sometimes I feel that the overzealous tendency of his fans (and likely PR people) to automatically give praise for anything he does or says (here on HN or on reddit) is actually counter-productive.<p>What if Elon starts doing something dumb some day and then when well-informed people try to provide meaningful criticism, they just get criticised and downvoted? I think that could actually undermine support from some of the people that Elon wants it from the most.

One good example of this is that every morning there is on the front page of &#x2F;r&#x2F;all exactly one article about the nba. Never two, never zero.

Why does this surprise anyone? I have a relative who is part of a PAC which &quot;mobilizes&quot; constantly to keep certain stories up high, nuke others, and even more. they aren&#x27;t limited to reddit, she has a list of sites to get the word out on.<p>the problem with fixing such issues is that many site owners want the traffic and some support the subject matter being pushed whether politics, education, products, or more.<p>you don&#x27;t even need paid groups to slant sites, the fanatics of some games, authors, or even technologies, have enough sycophants to insure their message is the only one heard

It&#x27;s very clear around certain topics--GMOs, pesticides, gun-control, and a few others. There are accounts that follow those keywords and only comment on related articles and only during 9-5 business hours.

Not surprising. I&#x27;ve grown increasingly tired of reddit over the last few months, but I haven&#x27;t found an adequate alternative. Any suggestions? What sites do you commonly visit?<p>Maybe this is my own bias showing, but whenever I read a Microsoft article on reddit, my shilling senses start tingling. I&#x27;ve seen a few confirmed examples, although luckily they usually end up getting banned.

Really doing a disservice to those of us who do this for no pay, day in and day out, simply for the love of shitposting.

Wish i could relocate the comment on a Boingboing story where one of their admins mentioned having tracked comments on a certain topic to a online PR company.<p>His attention was drawn to the comments because they were heavily reported when made, and would be largely of the same structure but with a new user name each time. So he pulled up the IP they came from and all of them was made from the company owned address.

While this is bad, in my experience, I feel that paranoia about shills does far more damage to online communities than any paid shill could.<p>...or maybe I&#x27;m being paid to say that. (I wish I was).

I&#x27;m pretty sure interviewing Gallowboob and taking what he says at face value is a pretty good example of being manipulated by a professional shill.

So, I just posted a comment pointing out people like upvote club sell upvotes for HN, but it looks like at least they don&#x27;t have the option to sell HN upvotes anymore. What happened, did the mods finally beat them? Or did they ask nicely that they stop that?

I thought there was a story about nike interns(or some other big company) using interns to leave good reviews and comments on reddit.<p>Anyways this is nothing new and something that obviously goes on without saying.

Worth watching, I skipped past this a few times, as we all know it goes on, but it&#x27;s good seeing him phone up a reputation agency and see what they say.

next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.